Sex before marriage was pretty common before. It just got covered up. There were a whole lot of extremely “premature” babies being somehow born at a healthy weight, but this only ever happened with a couple’s first child.

These days, pretty much the only people who never have sex before marriage are religious extremists. Those people also tend to believe that you can be tortured for eternity if you get a divorce, which probably reduces the incidence somewhat.

> These days, pretty much the only people who never have sex before marriage are religious extremists

That's an incredibly ignorant and inflammatory thing to say.

Nah, it's pretty much true, as someone from the bible belt even.

Hell, it was always true. The point of a diamond on the engagement ring was because it was assumed that you had kicked the tires on that part of the relationship, and the engagement fell through, then that woman had something she could sell as a nest egg for her new life as a forever alone spinster, being the 'broken woman' that she was.

I think this is assuming diamonds are a long held tradition. Pretty sure that is a rather heavy fabrication.

Well, all traditions are heavy fabrications.

As far as diamond engagement rings are concerned, it's about a century old tradition at this point, so four or five generations. That's a pretty long time for the purposes of this discussion.

And this comes form someone who didn't get their fiancée a diamond ring for various reasons.

Agreed to an extent. I posit they probably aren't 4/5 generations of actual traditional usage yet. Most folks great grandparents probably did not have diamond rings.

I should also have said this was more a side comment. I don't think it detracted from the overall point made earlier.

I really don't think it is, though I guess most religious extremists don't see themselves as such

"You shouldn't have sex before marriage" is an incredibly ignorant and inflammatory thing to say.

The only stats similar to this that I've seen was based on number of partners before marriage other than the one you married, in which case 0 had the lowest divorce rate. Waiting for marriage with the person you married was not measured nor reflected in the stats.

There are a ton of implications here that I don't buy. I could just as easily claim you are far less likely to get divorced if you aren't really given the option. Socioeconomic dependence being what it is.

By all means, though, keep your ideological superiority.

Source please on your claim that no sex before marriage leads to longer lasting marriages. That sounds like the kind of thing conservatives would make up without data to back themselves up. Also, even if it were true, longer lasting mariage doesn't mean happy marriage

Also I'm talking about nowadays, where people can have sex before marriage without having to become outcasts in their community or risk pregnancy (with protection. there is ofc still a risk, but it's much lower)

Getting married just to have sex when you could just have sex and then pick a partner when you really know them & not because you are horny seems like a wiser thing to do

It's true. You can run the numbers on data from e.g. the NSFG. It's probably not causation but just a sign of religiosity (and hence unwillingness to divorce), though.

Not the original poster, but I've seen it cited before.

https://ifstudies.org/blog/counterintuitive-trends-in-the-li...

Which uses data from the CDC NSFG.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/nsfg_cycle6.htm

yeah, this is possibly mostly a correlation with people being in religious groups were marriage is very frowned upon. you would expect that if sex before marriage is frowned upon, divorce is too